British Politics Are Picking Up a Few American Campaign Traits

LONDON —  Ideology is dead, historic differences are blurred, personalities dominate. Sex and sleaze grab bigger headlines than ideas and issues. Sound familiar?

Well, this time it is the British who are voting. Not Bill and Bob, but close enough: John and Tony are waging a “presidential-style” election campaign with a strong American accent.

The winner, incumbent Conservative John Major or Labor Party challenger Tony Blair, gets a five-year term as prime minister. Campaigning is in full cry, with Blair as the heavy favorite.

What remains is for Major to set the election date. Publicly, he leans to May 1, but some analysts think he could call a snap election as early as March 20.

Closer focus on the candidates than on their parties is a novelty in Britain, where Conservatives and Laborites have dueled for decades across an acrimonious gap between white and blue collars, bosses and workers, Tory toffs and Labor blokes.

But stereotypes no longer work. Since the end of the Cold War and the introduction of free-market reforms under former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, a Conservative, the social and economic gap between the parties has narrowed dramatically.

Major, a Conservative who rules a welfare state far to the left of Bill Clinton, didn’t go to college. Blair, who has dragged his party toward the capitalist center away from combative state socialism, went to Oxford University.

Newly powerful pollsters and image makers vie to present their candidate as trustworthy and the opposition as a threat.

Accusations fly across billboards and newspaper ads: “Same Old Tories, Same Old Lies,” “Enough Is Enough,” heckles Labor in taunts against nearly 18 years of Conservative rule.

“New Labor, New Danger,” say stark Conservative ads. “It Will All End in Tears” is the theme of the latest Conservative campaign.

Major was photographed in a Pakistani headdress on a visit this week to the Khyber Pass; Labor called it a blatant bid for the ethnic vote. Blair has changed his hairstyle, a move scoffed at by Tories as a bid to win more female voters.

As government figures this week showed a six-year low in unemployment, Conservatives were celebrating the government’s success and hoping it will translate into votes. What people want, Major says, is reliability: a continuation of good times.

Labor accuses the government of fiddling the job numbers. “Make no mistake about the desperation of the Tories; they will do anything, say anything to hang on to power. They think they have a divine right to rule,” Blair said.

Blair knows he must convince Britain that his party is now truly centrist and can govern effectively. He does not quarrel, for example, with formerly contentious Thatcher transformations such as trade union reform and widespread privatization of government industries and services.

What both Major and Blair promise is a welfare state that works better. They pledge better education, safer streets, more reliable national health care. And they vow to do it all without raising taxes. Each calls the other a liar.

Paddy Ashdown, leader of the third-party Liberal Democrats, says neither is telling the truth. Ashdown says people would pay more if they could be sure of getting value for their money on public services; he is urging his opponents “to raise the level of the debate on tax above puerile posters and posturing.”

Meanwhile, commentators see imported-from-the-U.S.A. personality politics and mudslinging as a new signpost of British politics.

“For the next few months, numerous highly paid and creative people will be trying to persuade the electorate that politics can be resolved into a contest between two opposite personalities. A primeval story of light and dark, protector and destroyer, will be spun: Major or Blair,” said analyst Andrew Marr in the Independent newspaper. “This is both crass and constitutionally impertinent.”